Diaries and journals can be among the most intimate and
revealing of texts, offering accounts of their authors' lives
with minimal literary artifice or mediation. Considered as
physical objects, too, they accrue the fascination of having
travelled with the writer through the events described in their
pages. The notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon
(1886-1967) during his service in the British Army in the First
World War are among the most remarkable documents of their
kind, and provide an extraordinary insight into his
participation in one of the defining conflicts of European
history.

Cambridge University Library holds the world's richest
assemblage of Sassoon's manuscripts and archival papers.
Accumulated from various sources over the course of several
decades, the collection was magnificently augmented in 2009
with the acquisition of the papers formerly retained in the
possession of Sassoon's only child, George. A gifted diarist,
Sassoon kept a journal for most of his life, and the papers
include a run stretching from 1905 to 1959. At the heart of
this series are the war diaries, a fascinating resource for the
study of the literature of the First World War which enables a
fresh analysis of Sassoon's experience of the catastrophic war
which influenced him profoundly.

Born at Weirleigh, near Matfield in Kent, Sassoon read Law
at Clare College, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree.
Sufficiently wealthy not to need to work, he adopted a life of
sporting leisure and bookish versifying until the outbreak of
war propelled him into the role of soldier-poet. Sassoon
enlisted as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry on 4 August 1914,
but later took a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
Despatched to France towards the end of 1915, he served with
conspicuous physical courage, being awarded the Military Cross
in June 1916 for recovering wounded men under fire.

At the outset of war Sassoon was an ambitious and
enthusiastic warrior, but by 1917 his first-hand knowledge of
the horrors of trench warfare, and his anger at the needless
suffering of his men and the ruinous waste of life which
characterized battles such as the Somme and Arras, had led to a
fundamental change of attitude. This development was reflected
in his increasingly well-regarded poetry, the tone of which had
grown gradually more bitter as the War progressed. With
language incorporating soldierly slang, his poems began to
employ sardonic or sarcastic twists, deliberately devised to
disturb the complacency of the civilian population at home.

While recuperating in Britain from a wound sustained at
Arras, Sassoon drafted his 'Soldier's Declaration', a statement
outlining his objections to the continuation of the War. Made
as 'an act of wilful defiance of military authority', it
detailed his refusal to return to duty and his belief that the
war was being 'deliberately prolonged by those who have the
power to end it'. His protest achieved national prominence when
the statement was read in Parliament and printed in The Times.
Instead of being court-martialled, however, Sassoon was
despatched to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, as a
patient of Dr W. H. R. Rivers. Under the guidance of Rivers,
Sassoon resolved to atone for the perceived abandonment of his
men by resuming his duties as an officer. He served in
Palestine and France during the last year of the War, before a
further wound in July 1918 brought his active contribution to a
close.

While he continued to write poetry for the rest of his life
and wrote a series of critically acclaimed autobiographical
memoirs, Sassoon's reputation remains primarily that of a war
poet. The anger, compassion and bitter realism of his poems
still resonate today, urging us still, a hundred years on, to
'swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget'.

This digitised collection makes available online for the
first time 23 of Sassoon's journals from the years 1915-1927
and 1931-1932, and two poetry notebooks from 1916-1918
containing rough drafts and fair copies of his war poems. A
further poetry notebook, presented by Sassoon to Lady Ottoline
Morrell, was begun in 1916 and augmented with additional poems
and images in the 1920s and ‘30s. Unlike edited printed
transcriptions, the digitisations allow the viewer to form a
thorough sense of the nature of the physical documents. Sassoon
wrote in a small but neat and legible hand, frequently using
the notebooks from both ends. His war journals were used for a
wide variety of purposes: in addition to making diary entries
Sassoon drafted poetry, made pencil or ink sketches, listed of
members of his battalion and their fates, made notes on
military briefings and diagrams of trenches, listed locations
and dates of times spent at or near the Front, noted
quotations, and transcribed letters. The wartime notebooks were
small enough to have been carried by Sassoon in the pocket of
his Army tunic, and many had enclosures such as letters tucked
into the outer cover or inner pouches; some bear tangible
evidence of use in the trenches, from the mud on notebook MS Add.9852/1/7
to the candlewax spilled on MS Add.9852/1/9,
presumably as Sassoon sat writing in his dug-out by
candlelight.

We are grateful to the Trustees of G. T.
Sassoon Deceased for permission to publish these images. Graves
material included with permission of A. P. Watt at United Agents on
behalf of The Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust.

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